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Peeling an egg
By Oli Usher, on 24 November 2014
Peeling a frog’s egg. Credit: Armin Kramer
This sequence of images shows the painstaking act of peeling a frog’s egg. The egg is gripped with tweezers, carefully torn open, and the cell nucleus inside is separated out. The nucleus is the small, pale blob in the centre of the final frame, and it is well under a millimetre across.
This difficult procedure is a key element in new research published by UCL scientists today. In the study, scientists probed the membrane that surrounds the cell nucleus in order to determine the structure of tiny pores that play a key role in cell biology.
A full summary of their research, including a remarkable image of these pores, produced using an atomic force microscope, is available from UCL News.
You can also watch a video of the process below.
